A property rights perspective offers a new way to comprehend the
balance of power among corporations and their neighbors in the credit
network. Meta-bargaining over property rights, or struggles among
players in the political arena, are well exemplified in the field of bankruptcy law, because the stakes are high; statutes on corporate bankruptcy
have far-reaching influence on power relationships among all organizations. However, meta-bargaining outcomes rest on two related processes:
the dynamics of law-making itself, and the politics of those professions
trying to control jurisdictional rights. In socio-legal studies, neither
statutory law-making nor the politics of professions in law-making have
been well treated. Yet theoretical initiatives on both law-making and
professional innovation promise to expand our understanding of metabargaining over rights in general, and meta-bargaining over the law of
corporate reorganization in particular.

Recent neo-institutional theory offers a promising start for an account
of professional influence in legal change. Neo-institutionalism has stimulated a resurgence of sociological interest in the importance of law and
professions for organizations of all sorts. While law has been taken for
granted and professions considered generally irrelevant in many theories
of corporate power, neo-institutional perspectives situate organizations
in a context defined by law and the state.

The neo-institutionalist school in organizational sociology has
developed a number of key insights. Neo-institutionalists recognize that
organizations depend on external resources, and that, to survive, organizations must "fit" with their environment (what they sometimes term
"organizational fields"). But they diverge sharply from classic sociological ideas about how such a "fit" emerges. In particular, neo-institutionalists argue that formal organizational structure frequently serves as a
symbol or signal that helps to legitimize the organization in the eyes of
key constituencies ( Meyer and
Rowan 1977; Scott and
Meyer 1991). If
an organization depends on an outside group for critical resources, it will
try to placate them symbolically. In the creation of suitable appearances,
organizational practices often become decoupled from formal structure.
Neo-institutionalists have also remarked on the uniformity or isomorphism characteristic of organizational structure. Simply put, many

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